Hello!
Just did a clean install openwrt-ar750-3.201-0227.bin and I cannot absolutely do nothing because not free space at all.
Which package can I uninstall safely to free space, make extroot and then reinstall again with no problems in router fonctions?
Or another solution to free space?
Or is that normal that I can’t do anything at all?
Thank you
There seems to be a lot of bloat in the 3.201 betas and since it is all in flash you cannot delete anything to free up space. I am testing on a AR300M16 using a USB drive as a extroot to be able to load anything but the smallest packages. Sure be nice if they could give us a core set of packages and let us load the optional packages we need for our use. I think we will be force into buying new models with more flash if we want to do any customization.
It can be its possible to double the space of partition and the space of RAM by useing compression for the space which is used for save the firmware and for the ram.
For double the RAM can used p.e.:
For double the parition, can be its possible by:
Remark:
It can be the RAM can double to triple on non x86 router without hardware cost by “ZRAM”. That`s is easy to install and works fine on x86 devices. See follow for first information:
Install it:
zram-config
Activate it:
swapon -s
Now have available the double space of the payed RAM without hardware cost. And the genial of this is, the compression of RAM are only running, if not enough RAM available.
It can be you can double the space of flash and other drives on Linux by one of the follow ways, without hardware cost (I didn’t test the follow):
A comparable technology are called on MS DOS “Double space” and on MS Windows “Drive Compression”. It can be they are a ported version of this, for Linux too.
I have used ZRAM on some old x86 notebooks running Linux that have only 1 GB of RAM and it is a great tool for making the notebooks much more responsive. The problem is the FLASH space, which is equivalent to hard drive space, is almost fully taken up in the 3.201 beta, so I am not out of RAM, I just have no space for long term storage of any additional packages.
I am already doing tricks like you recommend under 3.104, to get a package I need to fit in the FLASH space, by putting the package into a gzipped tar file, which just fit into the free FLASH space on a AR300M16 and then when the router boots, in rc.local, I create a 5MB tmpfs filesystem in RAM, and untar the package and run it from the RAM based file system. With 16MB of FLASH, and 128MB of RAM, I can give up some RAM to run the package, but with the 3.201 beta, there is no room now for my gzipped tar file without going to extroot.
Maybe the engineers at GL iNet can use compression to make the image smaller, but that something we cannot do ourselves unless we want to create a full build environment, and build our own version of the firmware. That is a lot of work that I have not decided to try yet. Maybe sometime in the future, once the 3.201 code is finally released and they have put the new code in the git repository, I will try building it and only include the packages I need.
Thank you all very much for these explanations. I am not a technician at OpenWRT, so I learn slowly.
I finally got the AR750 to work fine. I discovered the new Mountpoints feature in Luci.
To solve my problem, I factory reset my AR750 so I have about 150 kb free. I had an old 512MB USB stick, I formatted ext4, and I use the new Luci feature in firmware 3.201 Mountpoints to do the overlay mount point … reboot … now I have 477mb extra and then I restore my settings so I can make changes and install packages. To do this, I am not connected to the Internet to keep the 150 kb free … the problem was that if I restore my previous configuration and go to the Internet, after a moment there are only 50 kb free, so they cannot be done changes at all, even in SSH.
I know that for some people that not a very difficult thing to do.
Thank you
That should be possible on follow ways:
" ext4 doesn’t support compression, for that you need to use either Btrfs or ZFS (available in Ubuntu since 19.10 but it’s still experimental).
Compression can be also configured on block device level with Device mapper VDO and than you could use it with ext4 (because it doesn’t matter what filesystem is on top of the device), but that’s currently not supported in Ubuntu."
Source: